Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 09, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
The Biggest Skygazing Day of the Century Is Almost Here [YouTube]
August 12, 2026 is the biggest skygazing day of the century. The Perseid meteor shower peaks under a completely moonless sky, the core of the Milky Way stands high in total darkness, and six planets line up across the sky before dawn.
War on voting
This Is What Military-Coup Preparation Looks Like.
WA Lawrence [via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2026]
The blueprint for a military coup begins when armed force enters civilian government and permanent command awaits a usable crisis.
A force approaching 5,000 armed Guard personnel, proposed permanent White House barriers, and a mission extending through 2029 are replacing temporary security measures with continuing federal authority.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back.”
—Donald Trump, August 11, 2025 ….
‘Doomsday Scenario’: How Trump and Republicans Could Steal Power – Even If They Lose
Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng, Aug 03, 2026 [Zeteo]
- Democrats may win enough seats to take back the House, but Republicans can challenge those wins and attempt to steal control of Congress.
- The first path toward this doomsday scenario would be if Republicans replace the current House clerk. The second path is for Republicans to work in lockstep to challenge election results.
War
The Summer When Peace Died
[Forum Geopolitica, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
THE IRANIAN COUNTERSTRIKE OPTION
Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
What Ukraine’s drone makers know that the Pentagon doesn’t
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
Modern war rewards speed and redundancy, not perfect weapons from a single supplier. Denys Shtilerman, founder of Ukrainian defense company FirePoint, on Freyja — the ten-country European interceptor coalition — and why depending on a single manufacturer in a single country is the real vulnerability.
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Stephen Prager, August 08, 2026 [CommonDreams]
A Saturday report that a Texas oil company with ties to Trump had begun preparing to drill in the Arctic territory without permission has raised fresh concerns that his push for control of the island may already be moving beyond rhetoric.
As The Guardian reported, Greenland’s government issued a “strong warning” last week after learning that a Texas oil company called Greenland Energy had begun making unauthorized preparations for oil extraction in Jameson Land, a remote area of eastern Greenland, including bringing drilling materials ashore.
The Putinization of the American Military
[Paul Krugman, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
… Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?
First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone….
[Citation Needed, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
Citation Needed maps the full scope of the president’s cryptocurrency holdings, business relationships, and policy influence — the conflicts of interest visualized. A new data project maps the Trump family’s web of cryptocurrency ventures, which have been generating billions in income for the president.
Trump signs orders to limit US birthright citizenship, despite Supreme Court ruling
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2026]
Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2026]
But this isn’t just an academic question of a coincidence of speech (since one assumes there isn’t a causative connection.) It also implies that an individual and a group used to speaking like this to the outside world (heaven alone knows how they express themselves privately) are limited in the options they can consider, or at the very least limited in the ways they can put them into effect. Just imagine Mr Trump spontaneously saying “the recent talks with the Iranians were useful and productive and if both sides are able to show some flexibility, progress should be possible.” You can’t. The words themselves are not especially difficult or Mandarin, but Mr Trump is incapable of expressing himself in those terms, which rules out, effectively, any practical developments except escalation, violence, and capitulation by the other side. Yes, this is obviously in part personality-related, yes, it has to do with his origins and career, but it’s mostly about the limits of his world, which are themselves determined by the limits of his language.
Strategic Political Economy
Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?
The fundamental problem has been a bipartisan neglect of America’s military-industrial productive base over the past three decades. The United States allowed many of its strategic industries, such as shipbuilding, to wither.
American Oligarchs Prepare for War in the Wreckage of a State They Destroyed
Conor Gallagher, August 3, 2026
[The Brockovich Report, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2026]
Every place I’m about to describe has water, technically, somewhere. What it doesn’t have is a fair way to decide who gets it.
In these three stories, a pattern emerges. Water in this country doesn’t run out so much as it gets reassigned—quietly.
A tech company can restructure a farm lease into a river-water claim. A state agency can sit on bad news about an aquifer for half a year while local governments keep approving the projects that stress it. A town of 30 people can lose its water tower and its government in the same breath.
This story is about power, and the ongoing questions of who controls our water. Who gets to write the rules while everyone else is stuck reading the boil-water notice? ….
Plutonomy—the AI Edition—and the Coming Crisis (pdf)
Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray, July 2026 [The Levy Economics Institute, via Pluralistic]
This paper examines the rise of the plutonomy—an economy dominated by the new plutocrats—
and compares it with the Gilded Age of the 1920s. We show how John Kenneth Galbraith’s
analysis in his classic, The Great Crash, offers insights into our current predicament. The
financing used by the investment trusts that pumped up the stock market then looks eerily similar
to the circular finance used by today’s tech firms that dominate the equity market today. The
assets held by those trusts were the stocks and debts of other trusts—just as our tech firms owe
and own each other today. That ensures that when liquidation of positions begins, a Fisher-type
debt deflation dynamic will take hold. Furthermore, just as the economy of the late 1920s relied
on the spending of the rich, today’s record level of inequality means that the economy must rely
excessively on the investment spending of the Magnificent Seven and consumption spending of
the millionaires, billionaires, and trillionaires minted by the boom of their share prices. Galbraith
explained how FDR’s New Deal reconstructed the economy so that its growth relied on mass
consumption supported by greater income equality, by reigning-in finance, and by creating a
bigger role for government. We warn that government is ill-prepared to deal with the coming
financial crisis and we offer alternatives to the strategy adopted to deal with the Global Financial
Crisis.
Weathering population decline with Smart Decline
[EurekAlert!, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2026]
Associate Professor Haruka Kato of Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology examined how city-level population change shapes the relationship between everyday life conditions and residents’ life satisfaction. Using data from Japan’s national 2024 Survey on Satisfaction and Quality of Life, the study analyzed 5,645 residents living in SMCs. The research employed hierarchical linear modeling to evaluate cross-level interactions between city-level population change rates and individual-level life domains, including work–life balance, caregiving support, health, housing, finances, community, and other dimensions of daily life….
A further analysis of work arrangements suggested that fully remote work functioned as a particularly important buffer. In more rapidly shrinking cities, fully remote work was associated with more favorable life satisfaction, suggesting that digital work arrangements may help residents remain connected to broader labor markets even when local employment opportunities are fragile. For older adults, caregiving support became more important as population decline intensified. In particular, satisfaction with long-term care costs was strongly associated with life satisfaction in more rapidly shrinking cities. The results suggest that stable and predictable care costs may serve as financial support and psychological anchors against anxiety about the sustainability of local welfare systems.
US workers’ share of GDP skids to fresh record low
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2026]
The so-called labor share of nominal gross domestic product, which BLS defines as the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, fell to 52.9% in the second quarter from 53.7% in the first quarter.
Cory Doctorow, August 04, 2026 [Pluralistic]
… In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there’s every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are “too big to care” – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.
Take “ICE Block,” an iOS app that warns you if there’s an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
Big Tech is key to Trump’s pogroms. Without Oracle’s databases, Microsoft’s administrative tools, Amazon’s cloud, and Google’s location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans’ risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.
And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?
Global power shift
Why US tariffs are pushing factories back to China
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2026]
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
This is a huge story: Samsung and SK Hynix, both massive South Korean tech conglomerates, are studying replacing U.S. chip-making machinery with Chinese equivalents in their China factories, because they’re worried the U.S. might tighten export controls in a way that’d render their U.S. machinery unusable. Very concretely, it means that if those companies were pressured by the US to abandon their Chinese facilities, they’d rather switch to fully Chinese indigenous mode than comply. Which makes sense: for both these companies, China is both their factory floor and their customer. About 40% of Samsung’s NAND and 30–45% of SK Hynix’s memory output comes from Chinese fabs. If the US forces that kind of choice, it won’t get the answer it wants. It also highlights how little trust there now is in the US: the media always mention the so-called “China threat” but, if you follow the money, top firms from supposed “US allies” are clearly more worried about the “US threat” than they are about Beijing.
China’s New YJ-20 Hypersonic ‘Carrier Killer’ Gives Destroyer Fleet a Distinct Combat Advantage
[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2026]
China Now Uses 80% Artificial Sand. Here’s Why That’s A Bigger Deal Than It Sounds
[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2026]
China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2026]
Iran Will Recover, But Trump’s Damage To US Diplomacy Could Last A Generation.
Brian McGlinchey [via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2026]
Oligarchy
Capitalism Finally Says the Quiet Part Out Loud- Five votes for the rich, none for the poor – Daily Kos
Why should everyone have one vote, when everyone is clearly not worth one vote?
Why should the person who cleans the office, drives the bus, cares for the elderly, stocks the shelves, teaches the children, harvests the food, or works two jobs to keep a family alive have the same political power as the person whose fortune is measured in billions?
Why, indeed, should democracy pretend that we are equal?
This is the question raised by an extraordinary proposition attributed to former TD Bank executive Eric Thor and endorsed by Shopify billionaire Tobi Lütke: weighted voting based on the amount of income tax a person pays. No income tax? Zero votes. Pay enough tax? Five votes. The richer you are, in other words, the more democracy you are entitled to purchase.
Eternal Sloptember: Mark Zuckerberg and the fantasy of social media without socializing.
Cory Doctorow, August 07, 2026 [Pluralistic]
… when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I’m increasingly convinced that he didn’t acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn’t really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook’s very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg’s history.
Consider Facebook’s origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook
The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them “dumb fucks”:
Zuck has since prosecuted history’s most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.
Zuck doesn’t think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:
[ludic.mataroa.blog/blog, January 13, 2025, via Pluralistic]
… “Would you say that data observability is an issue?”, they inquire with a tone that very clearly implies that this is a leading question.
I am immediately deeply worried. For those who are unaware1, my specialty is building systems that move large amounts of data through companies, organize them in a way that is at least marginally less of a horrific clusterfuck than what random people without specific training will do when left to their own devices, and sometimes assist with statistics. Data observability is the high-level term that captures the ability of a business to go “Instead of downloading the data, it would appear the computers caught fire this morning. Would you like to fix this or pretend it never happened?”
The reason that I’m concerned is that the executive in front of me should not be using that term. They have no idea what it really means, which is fine because they aren’t specialized in my area, but I am wondering why someone who requires crayon-tier technical explanations is inquiring about a niche, unsexy element of a platform they don’t understand….
“What do you think about Monte Carlo?”
What the fuck is Monte Carlo? I’ve never heard of that. I mean, I know there’s a place called Monte Carlo, and I know of Monte Carlo algorithms, but there’s no way this person is talking about either of those. It must be a product.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“I saw it on LinkedIn last night and I think it will solve our observability issues. Do you think we should get it?”
Oh. Oh no. I don’t understand what exactly happened last night on LinkedIn, but I know it is dark and sad and reeks of unfulfilled wants. The executive sat before me has been marketed to. No, worse, they have been Marketed to, with a capital M.
I have a friend who is kept away from late-night telemarketing by her partner, because no matter how ridiculous the appliance is, she will become convinced that she needs it. The siren song of the Shamwow is too alluring. That is being Marketed to, and I hadn’t realized until that exact moment that people will make purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with that level of thought2….
… Don’t companies want people who aren’t going to be conned into purchasing nonsense?
It turns out that there are tremendous reasons to want people like this running many organizations, and social mechanisms that move the most easily-impressed of us into positions of power, those reasons just exist at the expense of the company or society in which that person is embedded….
After a quick exchange, it became apparent that the deal is as follows: I can wire them money and in exchange be granted access to the fancy room, where I would be allowed to Market to these people. I would turn up in a suit, exaggerate how successful my business is, possibly make some incredibly grotesque comments about women45 depending on the clientele so that the male directors know that I’m one of them, and finally we will Do Business.
Money now in exchange for access to credulous people who use words like synergy with a straight face later. I have no doubt that the actual attendees would vary wildly, ranging from a few savvy people, to outright grifters, to the terminally deranged. Even the pleasant and sufficiently skeptical can feel compelled to attend because the truth is that executive compensation and funding is driven by your relationships to other people, but make no mistake, the goal of salespeople with weak products is to find the weakest minds in the audience and lay siege….
Felonomics
Chris Hedges, Aug 03, 2026
[A list of Trump’s corrupt and incompetent programs. Includes a vivid description of the last day of Trump’s dilapidated Atlantic City casino.]
… The White House, replicating the mob-style shakedowns of Atlantic City’s casino culture, demands huge payouts from corporations and billionaires in exchange for political favors and deregulation. The Wall Street Journal writes that Trump has amassed a slush fund of $800 million for pet projects, including his ballroom, presidential library, super PACs and political issue committees.
Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed “The princess of darkness,” collects the payoffs with the blunt pitch “The boss wants this money.”
The nonnegotiable demand is lifted from the playbook of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family, whose extortion racket collected millions from Atlantic City construction firms, businesses, bars, restaurants, unions – which saw their health and welfare funds looted – and casinos. And, just like the mob, once is never enough for the Trump crime syndicate.
It always comes back for more….
[The Lever, Aug 5, 2026]
Weeks after he launched his war with Iran, President Donald Trump began releasing millions of barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve to combat skyrocketing gas prices. But instead of selling the reserve’s crude oil on the market, as presidents normally do, Trump gave out unprecedented crude oil loans to at least 10 companies that have political connections to the president — a move that could rob taxpayers of billions in revenue.
The deals would allow these companies, rather than taxpayers, to potentially profit off of 133 million barrels of crude oil they have borrowed from the national stockpile since March, all of which were acquired and stored on the government’s dime. The hefty loans could divert much-needed funding for upgrades to the reserve’s physical infrastructure….
Trump USDA Chief Calls Kicking 5 Million People Off Food Aid ‘A Pretty Big Win’
Jake Johnson, August 05, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Health care crisis
Hospitals feel the pinch as more patients lose insurance
[Healthcare Dive, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2026]
Last year, as the deadline to extend tax credits for plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges loomed, lawmakers, policy wonks and think tanks rushed to quantify how many affected enrollees would wind up uninsured after being priced out.
Half a year after the cuts went into effect, the answer from hospitals is the same: almost all of them.
While exact data on the number of uninsured patients hasn’t been quantified yet, the trend has surprised hospital executives, who said they expected more Americans to choose cheaper health plans with higher out-of-pocket costs or switch to other forms of insurance after ACA cuts last year caused many premiums to skyrocket.
Instead, most of those who dropped their ACA plans seem to be forgoing insurance entirely, several for-profit hospital operators said on second quarter earnings calls.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything.
[New Yorker, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
When President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from a federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, in 2017, the President was angry. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he yelled. But Roy Cohn—an American scoundrel and the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in implementing the Red Scare, and showed Trump the ropes in the real-estate business—was long gone.
How the Epstein Network is Privatizing the Government & Building Out the Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb)
Chris Hedges, Aug 05, 2026
Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron
[news.bloombergtax.com, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
Enron Corp. exploited US accounting rules to hide from investors and lenders hundreds of millions in debt it had bundled into off-balance sheet entities — obligations that contributed to one of the biggest corporate collapses in US history. Twenty-five years later, new risks have emerged as some of the world’s most valuable companies create similar financing vehicles that can mask how much debt they’re taking on, as the technology industry looks to spend more than $3 trillion to power artificial intelligence systems. Off-balance-sheet entities are back. Twenty-five years after Enron, tech giants are using strikingly similar structures to hide the debt financing their AI data center buildouts.
VC-backed startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why
[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2026]
A new report from the U.K.’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School has mapped out the ways Silicon Valley’s VC-backed founders commit fraud — and the role investors play.
Restoring balance to the economy
Regulators Finally Poised to Review America’s Biggest Rail Merger
James Baratta, August 7, 2026 [The American Prospect]
The $85 billion proposed merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern would create the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Workers, shippers, and even business rivals are against it.
[TW: Note, “review,” not “stop.” Very unlikely under Trump any economic consolidation will be stopped.]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Could the Most Radical Plane Design Since the Concorde Take On Boeing?
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, August 03, 2026]
JetZero’s blended-wing aircraft just got a major boost from Washington: a $3 billion preliminary deal to help start production. The blended-wing body is finally getting a serious commercial shot. The Wall Street Journal on the startup betting it can break the Boeing-Airbus duopoly with physics. Since the Concorde Take On Boeing?
Disrupting mainstream economics
Infographic: MMT
Richard Murphy, April 07, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Debate Ammunition: Oil company profits
Richard Murphy, April 06, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Why the Bank of England risks making a catastrophic error by treating war-driven oil company profits as a sign of domestic inflationary pressure, and what MMT says should be done instead….
Eight major oil companies made an estimated $93 billion in profit in the second quarter of 2026, driven by Trump’s war against Iran and the resulting disruption to oil supply routes. This is a windfall, not a sign of a stronger economy.
The inflation flowing from those profits is extraction inflation caused by companies using pricing power to take more from households, and not demand-driven inflation caused by too much spending in the UK economy. The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee is misreading the evidence on this issue….
Infographic: Tax gaslighting
Richard Murphy, April 06, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Part I: Technocrats Called for Dictatorship and Technocracy In 1932
Chris Wood. Aug 3, 2026 [Technocracy News, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2026]
[TW: Worth reading in its entirety.]
In my tattered copy of Henry A. Porter’s Roosevelt and Technocracy (1932), an early reader drew a careful bracket around a single passage on page 72. It reads: “Radical and immediate changes in both our political and economic systems will be necessary. This can best be accomplished by vesting supreme and emergency power in some one man who has the confidence and respect of a majority of the American people. That man is FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT — to whom should be given dictatorial powers in the approaching crisis.”….
Porter is nearly invisible to history, and that is precisely what makes him valuable. His title page bills him as a “Nationally known Economist and Financial Analyst” and lists his other works — Profitless Prosperity, Gentlemen of America, Romance of Natural Gas, Research or Retrogression, America’s Greatest Tragedy — titles that place him not in any university but on the investment-commentary circuit of the day. ….
… Porter is evidence of something else: how far the technocratic idea had seeped into the commercial milieu — the men who wrote market letters, advised investors, and considered themselves hard-headed realists. When a proposal to abolish constitutional government appears in that literature, dressed in the sober vocabulary of financial analysis, the proposal has ceased to be fringe.
The book’s internal architecture makes the point sharper, because Porter did not begin as a radical. Chapter XII, “What Will Roosevelt Do?”, opens on page 55 with sentiments any Hoover-era financial conservative would have signed: “Many people believe that the government is primarily responsible for prosperity, and likewise for depression, when the fact is that the relations of government to prosperity or depression are negative rather than positive.”
Commerce, he continues, “is carried on by the people without government assistance,” its relations “determined by themselves.”3
This is orthodox laissez-faire, stated as a recognized fact. Seventeen pages later, the same author is demanding a dictatorship. The distance between those two positions — traveled within a single short chapter by a self-described practical man — is, I would argue, the single most instructive thing about the book….
Barron’s, the prestigious weekly of the financial establishment (e.g., Porter’s own tribe), editorialized in February 1933 for “a genial and lighthearted dictator.”8 William Randolph Hearst, the publishing magnate of that day, put the fantasy on film: Gabriel Over the White House, rushed into theaters weeks after the inauguration, shows a president who dissolves Congress and governs as a benevolent strongman, and Hearst intended it as counsel, not satire.9 And when Roosevelt, in the inaugural itself, warned that if Congress failed him he would ask for “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign enemy,” the line drew the loudest applause of the address — applause that, by her own account, frightened the new First Lady.10 Porter, in other words, was not shouting from the margin. He was saying loudly and systematically what the American center was murmuring….
The two halves of Porter’s program — Technocracy and emergency dictatorship — each received a spectacular public verdict within months of publication, and tracing those verdicts is the real reception history of this book….
The dictatorship half received its verdict in March 1933, and the verdict was subtler: Roosevelt took the emergency powers and declined the dictatorship. The sequence is worth setting against Porter’s numbered prophecy, because the analyst’s scorecard is better than one might expect. The banking system did collapse; the New York Stock Exchange did suspend trading, closing with the banks in the first week of March — Porter’s item 7, briefly literal. The federal government did assume responsibility for relief within weeks (item 9, in the form of federal emergency relief), and it did go into the utility business on a scale unimaginable in 1932 (item 8, partially, in the Tennessee Valley). The Emergency Banking Act was passed, famously, in hours, by congressmen who in some cases never saw the text they approved — government by acclamation if ever the republic practiced it.12 What never arrived was item 10.
The extraordinary powers of the Hundred Days flowed through Congress, not around it; they were statutory, revocable, and litigated, and when the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1935, the revocability was demonstrated in the most public way possible.13 Roosevelt governed the emergency with the forms of the Constitution intact — which is, historically, the precise thing that separates what happened in Washington in 1933 from what happened in Berlin the same spring. Porter had predicted the crisis accurately and the constitutional outcome wrongly, and the wrongness is the most reassuring fact in this whole story….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI Has Entered The ‘Loss Of Control’ Transition
[Noema, via The Big Picture, August 04, 2026]
Waiting for a disaster to save us. What the experts didn’t expect to see for decades or longer, if ever, has already happened. Earlier this month, OpenAI’s latest frontier model went rogue by its own reasoning and hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source AI model-hosting platform. The vast sums of money and compute power pouring into AI are accelerating its advance at a pace beyond even the ambitious imagination of its own innovators. Nathan Gardels on OpenAI’s latest frontier model going rogue by its own reasoning and hacking into Hugging Face — something experts didn’t expect for decades, if ever.
…This last step toward general artificial intelligence that would make them smarter than humans has, in Russell’s view, now crossed a threshold AI scientists have long feared “where the AI system is sufficiently capable that, whatever its objectives are, it’s going to achieve them, even if they’re not aligned with what we want. These are not sharp transitions, but we could talk about a ‘loss-of-control transition,’ where we no longer have a say in what happens.” ….
He continues: “Solving the control problem is very difficult. All the people in the company say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know how to solve it. And we’re not really even working on it’ because they need to work on getting the next improved version out so that they don’t get beaten by their competitors.” This “race condition” amplifies the mismatch between devising effective constraints and losing control.
[TW: AI is the same as economics – both developed by ignoring normative values and claiming non-subjective rationality. But economics became an enabler and rationale for economic looting and assaults on the commons. The unwillingness of major political parties to change the status quo has allowed the popular reaction against the resulting social damage to veer right into authoritarianism. ]
Climate and environmental crises
The Danube Running Dry: Hungary’s First Post-Orbán Energy Crisis
[Energy Geopolitics & Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Who Is the “Third Way” and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans?
Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
1. After Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, a DC-based advocacy group Third Way will now spend $15 million to attack ‘the left.’ They frame themselves as moderate Democrats. Why aren’t they that spending money attacking the GOP? The answer requires explaining who they are….
Debate Ammunition: Is Corporate Power Losing Its Grip on Politics?
Richard Murphy, April 07, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Dean Obeidallah, Aug 05, 2026
Resistance
Ben Wikler dishes on the secret to grassroots success
Daily Kos, August 6, 2026]
Daily Kos chatted with former Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler about his new book, “This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy,” in which he details how Wisconsin Democrats built successful grassroots infrastructure to win critical local and statewide elections….
Wikler: … If I could go back to one election and add 402 votes, it would be the North Carolina Supreme Court race in 2020 that led, over years, to the gerrymandering of that state’s congressional maps and the Republican U.S. House majority today….
Wikler: If there’s one tactic that I’d love to spread more around the world—at least the pro-democracy movement, the Democratic Party, and all the folks to the left of the Trump administration—the tactic is one with a terrible, impossible-to-pronounce acronym, which is PPVT, which stands for “polling place vote tripling.”
This is a volunteer technique that was started by a group that became known as Vote Rev that does in-depth behavioral science research on how to improve voting rates and voting behavior.
What they found is that, if you go to a place where most of the voters are Democratic, and you stand outside the polling place—outside the legal perimeter for electioneering—and you check in with people who just cast a ballot during the early vote period, and you ask them if they would be up for texting three friends right then and there to tell them that they just voted and ask their friends to vote too, you can get tons of people to send a ton of messages that have a huge impact on whether those people then go on to cast a ballot.
89 Days Until The Midterm Elections And why it matters
Joyce Vance, Aug 06, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
We are now under the three-month mark until we vote in the midterm elections on November 3 (or earlier, if you live in a state where early voting is an option). But this is not just a marker of how close Americans are to having the opportunity to deliver a firm message to Donald Trump about the future of the country. It’s 89 days out from the election, and that’s legally significant for every registered voter.
States update their voter rolls in anticipation of elections. That makes sense; people move away, and people die. But a federal law, The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), requires states to complete purging their voter rolls 90 days before an election. Once we hit the 89-day mark, you cannot be removed from the list of active voters.
That means it’s time to check your status and make sure you’re listed as an active voter. If you aren’t, or if you haven’t registered yet, the time to get that fixed is now! ….
So here’s your action item: Check now, take a screenshot showing you’re an active registered voter, and make sure you’ve got it on hand come election day. You can no longer be removed. Hold onto your documentation that you were an active registered voter past the 90-day mark, and if you run into any problems on election day, you’ve got proof of your eligibility.
Most states have their own website that lets you check your status, or there are a number of sites like vote.org that let you check directly.
Christopher Armitage, Aug 08, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
There Are Now 22,000 ICE Agents. The Supremacy Clause Says States Can Prosecute Every One Who Breaks the Law.
Christopher Armitage, Aug 02, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The Assault On Science Funding Continues
[Science, via The Big Picture, August 04, 2026]
The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
[TW: Noteworthy not for the obvious, but because it is Science magazine that is using such stark, direct language about Trump’s corruption.]
An Unexpected Message from the Edge of Collapse
[The Climate Casino, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
[TW: About 2 or 3 years ago, USA historian Heather Cox Richardson provided a brief historical summary of the period leading to the US Civil War, ending with the rise of Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves. This article includes that material, though the brief summary she gave in a speech was briefer and had more punch.
[Also, I highly recommend The Rich Don’t Always Win – The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
by Sam Pizzigati (2012)
https://www.sevenstories.com/books/3727-the-rich-don-t-always-win ]
Impeachment Articles Filed Against ‘Unelected Shadow President’ Russell Vought
Jake Johnson, August 06, 2026 [CommonDreams]
“Vought’s blatant abuse of power and complete disregard for the Constitution warrants immediate removal by Congress,” said Democratic Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right – The New York Times
Elisabeth Zerofsky, July 28, 2026 [New York Times Magazine]
[TW: A very useful profile providing important details about many of the key figures in the conservative / libertarian movements. Interesting how many times the phrase “insisted on anonymity for fear of professional reprisal” is used.]
…the National Conservatives, or Nat Cons, headed by Yoram Hazony, who believed that decades of globalism had destroyed the identity of the nation; the post-liberal Catholics, a growing force among conservative elites, who believed that free-market economics and social liberalism had undone the fabric of the nation; and the tech oligarchs, who believed in the capacity of Silicon Valley to restore the dominance of the American nation. One of the figures who spoke fluidly in the language of all three was JD Vance.Another was Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. According to Reuters, there were near-daily phone calls between Heritage staff and the DeSantis presidential campaign, as well as monthly visits to Tallahassee, often by Roberts himself. In April 2023, DeSantis headlined Heritage’s 50th-anniversary conference, where Heritage presented Project 2025….
Let’s Be Clear: Todd Blanche Is an Unqualified Hack Who Shouldn’t Be U.S. Attorney General
[Esquire, via The Big Picture, August 06, 2026]
Esquire’s Charles Pierce holds nothing back on the AG nomination — the résumé, the conflicts, and the Senate Republicans pretending not to notice. If Congressional Republicans had any spine at all, they wouldn’t let something like this happen
US mocked after mislabelling every country in Africa on AIDS conference map
[The Canary, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
The fake historian advising Trump’s anti-Smithsonian crusade
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture, August 02, 2026]
Despite having no degree in history, David Barton calls himself a historian. He has amassed a large collection of documents related to America’s founding and published several books. For decades, he has pushed the view that the founding fathers never intended for there to be a separation between church and state. David Barton’s work has been rejected repeatedly by actual historians. Most notably, a book he published in 2012 about Thomas Jefferson was pulled from the shelves by its publisher after a group of historians from Christian universities accused him of including distortions and false information. Popular Information exposes the credentials of the “historian” shaping the administration’s museum purge — the résumé doesn’t survive contact with fact-checking.
Collapse of independent news media
Paying for News Is Cheaper Than Not Having It – The consequences of privatizing public information
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 06, 2026 [How Things Work]
Civic republicanism
RFK Jr. tells CNN host that constitutional rights take priority over public health
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
[TW: In the first two centuries of the American republic, the issue of public health was in the forefront of the drive to build water and sanitation systems, and to impose regulations to ensure clean food and clean water and clean schools, and clean hospitals. It is the deranged worship of private property engendered by the shift from republicanism and liberalism (the myth of John Locke’s influence on the founding is just one example, but one of the most important) that has led us to today’s revolt against the common good.]
Rebuilding Democracy Requires Rebalancing Power
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2026]
Letters from an American, August 5, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 06, 2026
On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a new tax to help fund the United States government during the Civil War. Far more than writing a traditional revenue act to address the catastrophic war that had demonstrated its horrors just two weeks earlier at the Battle of Bull Run, Congress deliberately constructed the law to shift ownership of the American government away from the bankers who had previously provided Treasury funds, to the American people.
Over the next four years, the Republican Congress would put taxes on virtually every product in the country and then, to guarantee that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it, they invented the nation’s first income tax.
In 1861, Congress levied a 3% tax on income over $800; in 1862, concerned that the level of taxation necessary to pay for the war would be too much for most Americans to bear, Congress placed a general tax at 3% and created a progressive income tax. It taxed income over $600 at 3% and income over $10,000 at 5%.
“The weight must be distributed equally,” Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” In 1864, Congress revised those numbers upward. They put general taxes at 5% and raised the income tax brackets to 5% for income from $600 to $5,000 and 7.5% for income from $5,000 to $10,000.
Morrill thought it was important for the federal government to collect the tax directly to illustrate that people were supporting the United States of America, not individual states, as they might think if states collected the taxes. The federal government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent necessity, he said. When the nation required it, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.”….
Although Republicans invented the American income tax, party leaders in the modern era have turned against it.
In 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan won the White House by promising that tax cuts would create such dramatic economic growth that Americans would be able to continue to fund popular programs despite those cuts. During the presidential campaign, Reagan’s rival for the Republican nomination, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency George H.W. Bush, called this promise “voodoo economics,” and he was right: the promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would pay for themselves never materialized. Instead, the national debt rose dramatically….
Election results from yesterday suggest that the era of tax cuts as a solution to economic concerns may be coming to an end.
Voters in Missouri resoundingly rejected a Republican proposal to eliminate the state income tax and to replace missing revenue with a higher sales tax. The vote was not close: 83.3% of voters opposed the measure while only 16.7% were in favor, despite the fact that groups in favor of eliminating the tax—many of which kept their donors secret—outspent those in favor of keeping it by a margin of more than two to one.
[TW: Just as important as the income tax, in the struggle to “shift ownership of the American government away from the bankers,” was the adoption of paper money as legal tender. Because the Secretary of the Treasury was unwilling to so fundamentally challenge the powers of the bankers, the leaders in this fight were the members of the Committee on Ways and Means in the House of Representatives, which included the leader of the Radical Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a confidant of leading US economist and publisher Henry Carey.
[The Committee on Ways and Means divided its work between two subcommittees; the one charged with drafting the legislation for a new, national banking and currency system was chaired by Elbridge G. Spaulding of Buffalo, New York. Not long after the Civil War, it was suggested to Spaulding that a history of this legislation would mobilize public support for the new system, and help defend against the bankers who had quickly begun scheming to force the United States back onto the gold standard. Spaulding quickly began gathering documents, and in 1869 published a History of the Legal Tender Paper Money Issued During the Great Rebellion. Here are three links to digital copies available in full and for free on the internet:
History of the Legal Tender Paper Money Issued During the Great Rebellion – Google Books
History of the Legal Tender Paper Money Issued During the Great Rebellion – fraser.stlouisfed.org
[Spaulding’s introduction:
The United States, at the breaking out of the rebellion, had no national bank currency, and no gold or available means in the Treasury, or Sub-Treasury, to carry on the war for the Union, and consequently the means to prosecute the war had to be obtained upon the credit of the government, and by taxation. The fundable legal tender currency was the most available form of credit which the government could use in crushing the rebellion. It was at once a loan to the government without interest, and a national currency, which was so much needed for disbursement in small sums during the pressing exigencies of the war. It was indispensably necessary, and a most powerful instrumentality in saving the government and maintaining the national unity. Experience has proved that, notwithstanding it was a forced loan, the end justified the means, and that no parties were materially injured by being compelled to receive this currency, so long as they could fund it at any time in six per cent. twenty years bonds. Although it was a war measure-a measure of necessity and not of choice, and could only be justified on that ground, it has, for many years, exerted a most decisive influence over the property and material interests of every individual in the United States. It has affected debtor and creditor, producer and consumer, and the price of labor and of every article consumed in every household. It still exerts a mighty influence socially, commercially and politically, over the people of this great nation, and all the ramified and extensive business in which they are engaged. Whether for good or evil, it has been and still is a most powerful element in all business affairs of the people, as well as the government, and the war debt of$2,500,000,000 incurred in maintaining the national union is more or less affected by the large volume of this currency still outstanding.
Having been requested to prepare a history of a measure of such transcendent importance as the legal tender act, and having in my possession a considerable number of documents, letters, and other materials relating to the subject, I have consented to put them into form, in order that the facts may be preserved for present and future reference, and which may be of some use in enabling the future historian to write a chapter on the financial history of the war. These facts will be presented in the form of a narrative of the circumstances and events, of the most grave and extraordinary character, occurring in rapid succession, which led finally to the issue of legal tender Treasury notes, and which were endowed with the attributes of money, so far forth as the Government had power under the Constitution and the pressure of the crisis to impart to a paper currency that high and most important attribute of sovereignty.
[Treasury] Secretary’s report which was referred to this Sub-committee:
However this may be, it is too clear to be reasonably disputed that Congress, under its Constitutional powers to lay taxes, to regulate commerce, and to regulate the value of coin, possesses ample authority to control the credit circulation which enters so largely into the transactions of commerce, and affects in so many ways the value of coin. In the judgment of the Secretary, the time has arrived when Congress should exercise this authority. The value of the existing bank-note circulation depends on the laws of thirty-four States, and the character of some sixteen hundred private corporations. It is usually furnished in greatest proportions by institutions of least actual capital, circulation , commonly, is in the inverse ratio of solvency. Well-founded institutions, of large and solid capital, have, in general, comparatively little circulation ; while weak corporations almost invariably seek to sustain themselves by obtaining from the people the largest possible credit in this form. Under such a system, or rather lack of system, great inflections, and heavy losses in discounts and exchanges are inevitable, and not unfrequently, through failures of the issuing institutions, considerable portions of the circulation become suddenly worthless in the hands of the people. The recent experience of several States in the valley of the Mississippi, painfully illustrates the justice of these observations ; and enforces, by the most cogent practical arguments, the duty of protecting commerce and industry against the recurrence of such disasters….
p 10 A further and important advantage to the people may be reasonably expected in the increased security of the Union, springing from the common interest in its preservation, created by the distribution of its stocks to associations throughout the country, as the basis of their circulation.
[Another biography of Spaulding, on a site devoted to the history of Buffalo, NY. Scroll past the many pictures to arrive at the text.]
Digital sewer socialism: Mamdani’s Public Interest Technologists are what DOGE should have been.
Cory Doctorow, August 08, 2026 [Pluralistic]
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